“Building Carbon in America’s Farms, Forests, and Grasslands: Foundations for a Policy Roadmap” offers new analysis to support long-term planning to enhance U.S. land management of carbon sinks to ensure healthy and productive landscapes contribute to greenhouse gas reduction goals.

“Carbon sequestration” describes the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in a stable state. Direct carbon sequestration occurs in plants as they photosynthesize atmospheric CO2 into biomass, which means it is stored in “sinks” instead of being released into Earth’s atmosphere

The Chicago Climate Exchange’s Agricultural Offset Project Protocol details how continuous conservation tillage and conservation to grasslands can yield soil carbon sequestration benefits that can pay off for farmers and the environment.

COMET-Farm is a conservation planning tool used to assess a farm’s greenhouse gas balance. This tool enables users to generate a report to compare alternative management strategies and to what extent alternate scenarios would provide carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

Downeast Lakes Land Trust’s carbon project covers more than 19,000 acres of the trust’s 33,700 Farm Cove Community Forest in eastern Maine, and registered nearly 200,000 offsets; each offset is equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide.